Aunt Sass: Christmas Stories

by P. L. Travers

  Johnny’s first concern with regard to us was to give us education. He had very definite ideas on the proper accomplishments for the young. One was Knot-tying. We could all have vied with any sailor at a very early age. Another was Spitting. Not merely ejecting saliva but spitting as an art. He taught us the Long Spit and the Drop Spit and, last, the Over the Shoulder. In this, as in all else, he was a perfectionist. He roared, swore and jibed at us until, from sheer weariness, we became good enough to pass. From the earnest attention he gave this pastime you would have thought that our future lives were all to be spent in bar-rooms full of trickily placed spittoons. To this day I cannot see a man spitting in the street without a feeling of contempt for his lack of aplomb, vulgar disregard of artistry, and ignorance of proper targets and the way to aim at them.

  There were, however, genteeler aspects to Johnny’s compulsory training. These were ‘Singin’, Community Dancin’ and a Thorough Knowledge of the Stars and Constellations’. In the latter subject we never got further than Orion’s Belt, the Southern Cross and Berenice’s Hair. Possibly because Johnny’s own grasp of the stars was limited and chancy. We could jig, however, and dance a reel like any Aran Islander. And in the matter of singing, though his voice was as harsh as a mountain hawk’s, Johnny was no mean tutor. That man could have made the angels sing, simply by swearing at them. Almost before we could say the words, he had us on firsts and seconds. Glowering, he would stand before us, conducting with a stick of cane, while ‘Believe me if all’ and ‘Rendal, my son’ streeled thinly from our lips. But above all other songs, he preferred our two-part rendering of that melancholy chant—

  She’s the most disthressful cou-un-three

  That iver yet was seen—

  They’re hangin’ men an’ women for

  The Wearin’ o’ the Green

  When Matt Heffernan, to get some of his own back, secretly taught us ‘The Battle of the Boyne’–that song so loved of Orangemen–Johnny gave one of his best performances. The swearing lasted for forty-five minutes. For Johnny, as you will have guessed, was politically a Rebel.

  In addition to tutoring us on the plantation, Johnny constituted himself our guardian on the rare occasions when we left it. Among our father’s idiosyncrasies was a mania for collecting every possible sort of conveyance. A four-wheeler, a hansom cab, an old howdah and an elegant sledge were housed together in the barn with carts, wagons and sulkies. Whether he hoped he would someday have a paved road for the four-wheeler, an elephant for the howdah and a fall of snow for the crimson sledge nobody ever knew. The only one of the four oddities that could be used in the bush was the hansom. And in this we were driven to the town of MacKinley for clothes, dentist and parties. There we would sit in the hot little box, with cane and paw-paw, mango and orange brushing greenly by the windows. Behind, high up in the driving seat, sat Johnny with his whip. Through the opening in the roof his face would peer down from time to time, looking like a mouldy patch on the ceiling. At the end of the drive he would stumble down, swing back the doors with a princely gesture, and tweak us out one by one. If we were going to the dentist he would murmur banefully ‘Exthractions!’ If to a party, he would sweep us with a disgusted glance, wet the corner of his handkerchief on our tongues and give a last rub to our faces. Once, after somebody’s birthday dance, the youngest child salvaged a chocolate cat to take home to our mother. As soon as he saw it Johnny snatched it away and proceeded to lick its melting contours into a shape more feline. ‘And who’s to tell her?’ he demanded when one of us dared to protest. ‘Ye’d insult the woman giving her a lump the like o’ that!’

  I shall always remember MacKinley–that ugly little wooden town with its corrugated roofs. Not only because of our trips with Johnny but because it was in MacKinley that we last saw Johnny alive. Maybe he was older than we guessed. Or perhaps the friction of his inward nature had worn his life away. Death and Johnny–it seems to me now–were never far apart. For a long time–even the children could see it–he had been growing thinner. Then he suddenly developed a cough so cavernous that his bones seemed to rattle with it. In vain our parents pleaded with him, to rest, to take a vacation. He only answered them viciously and worked with doubled zest. Demons of speed and work were in him. His advice grew more malevolent daily and his swearing more inventive. He seemed to have reached his inmost seam of bane and tribulation. When he was not in the stables, or presiding over family affairs, he was darting about the ripened cane-fields jeering the cutters on. And at evening when we passed his room we would hear him muttering to himself as he sat within his hump.

  Then one day, after the cane was cut, he galloped into MacKinley. We heard later that his last three pay-cheques were in his pocket and that he had ‘blown’ them gloriously. When at night the policeman, out of pure friendship, popped him into the lock-up there wasn’t a man in the whole township who hadn’t been treated by Johnny.

  I remember our father’s look of concern when somebody told him the news. ‘That’ll finish him!’ he said angrily. And the next thing we knew we were in the dog-cart, driving through the shadowy bush instead of going to bed. It was a lucky thing for us that Kate was staying away with her brother. We should never have been allowed otherwise to embark on such an adventure.

  The excitement of sleeping in MacKinley’s hotel was doubled for us by Johnny’s coughing. It reached us from the rackety lock-up that stood a few yards away; and our dreams that night were punctuated by the hollow, mournful sound. In the morning, before anyone else was awake, we crept out through the beer-smelling bar and stood beneath the lock-up windows in fearful expectation. There, within the walls, was Johnny. Invisible to our watching eyes but terrifyingly audible. It was like being in some dreadful story, to stand outside in the burning sun and listen to that cough. Clamped to the door was a big black lock. There were thick black irons at the window. We were stifled and choked, as if we were drowning. Johnny to be shut away in there and we not able to see him! A panic ran through all of us; we stared at each other in terror. But suddenly–as though at a whispered, secret order–the air flowed back again to our lungs and we all began to sing. The tune came thin and shaky at first, because of our dreadful excitement.

  Believe me if all those endearing young charms That I gaze on so fondly today—

  And, as if by magic, at the first phrase, a face appeared at the window. One bar flung a shadow across his brow, and between two others came Johnny’s hand, beating time with a tin teaspoon. Cocking his head to one side–an old familiar gesture–he listened to our rising voices for a hint of a flat note. He waved the teaspoon peremptorily and between his coughs he nodded sternly, drawing the altos and tenors from us with never a smile of praise. From his expression he might have been conducting the Bach Choir or a group of backward angels. We sang on, right through the repertoire, with Johnny naming each song in turn and the town of MacKinley gathering behind us, gaping up at the window.

  ‘Now, “You’ll tak the high-road”!’ commanded Johnny, as we came to the end of ‘Rendal’. But at that moment–why at that moment?–the awful cruelty of childhood rose into all our breasts. As Johnny waited expectantly, holding his teaspoon high, we swung into Heffernan’s ‘Battle’ song with a tuneless, taunting shriek—

  O-o-o oh, we’re up to our necks in Irish blood, We’re up to our necks in slaughter!

  Were we not safe, out here in the sun? Wasn’t Johnny up there behind the bars and a big black lock on the door? There was nothing he could do to us and everything we could do to him.

  And didn’t we give the Irish Hell

  At the Battle of Boiling Water?

  In desperate and painful elation we came to the end of the ugly song and waited for the storm. But there was silence. No sound but the clink of metal on stone as the teaspoon fell to the ground. Johnny clasped the bars with his knotty fingers and leaned his head on his hands. Defeat and resignation were in that gesture–as though he had received, and accepted, a painful mortal wound. Then he raised h
is head. His face had a sweet and terrible sadness as he gazed down upon us. Locked there like an ape, a trapped wild creature, he looked at us through the bars. Then he said, in a soft, beseeching whisper–‘Childer, little childer, do yez want to break me heart?’

  There was such gentleness, such awful mildness in those words, that we were lost and abandoned. We did not know what to do nor where to go. A dreadful sense of shame filled us; we dared not look at him. But we flung ourselves, repentant and loving, against the wall of the lock-up.

  ‘Johnny! Johnny! Johnny!’ we cried, as though by repeating the beloved name we would somehow be forgiven. And we were forgiven–in Johnny’s peculiar way.

  A familiar stream of imprecation came pouring down from the window. Johnny’s face, as it glared out through the bars, was now a cauldron of rage. We stood beneath the fountain of fury absolved by the pelting words. The sad, beseeching gentleness had thrust us into the cold. Now we were home and warm again, saved by the flood of his anger. Behind us the township murmured proudly. ‘He’s at the top of his form today; I never heard him better!’

  ‘And take that into yer wretched gizzards!’ came Johnny’s peroration. Then the raging face disappeared from the window; nothing was heard from within the lock-up but a paroxysm of coughing…

  It was days before we saw Johnny again and by that time he was beyond the power of man or child to hurt him.

  From the lock-up he was taken to the hospital and only released from that second prison because he insisted to our father that he must come home ‘for a while or two’ to finish his life’s work.

  They brought him back in an ambulance, two nights before Christmas. And they left him alone, in his old hut, at his own angry insistence. In the morning they found him dead. It had only taken a few hours to do what he had to do.

  ‘Johnny’s gone to Heaven,’ said our mother, with a sort of tearful brightness.

  We looked at her disbelievingly. Johnny had despised Heaven. To have gone there would have been clear against his principles. Johnny Delaney a blackleg? We thought it extremely unlikely. Unless, of course, God needed him to teach the angels to spit.

  ‘I suppose you mean he’s dead,’ said somebody, and our mother, seeing her careful myth dissolve, simply wept and said yes.

  ‘Well, now we can have his emu’s egg,’ said another child calmly.

  ‘Oh, heartless, heartless!’ cried our mother, looking at us in terror; seeing, perhaps, her own death and the four of us wrangling over her jewels.

  But we were not heartless. We were using a common childish device to protect ourselves from disaster. Children have strong and deep emotions but no mechanism to deal with them. If once they let their hearts fill up they know that they will be drowned. So they seize on the nearest objective thing to keep down the rising flood. Our amulet was the emu’s egg, twofold in healing magic. For it held within it Johnny’s death and at the same time brought us safely past it.

  Before he was buried they took us to see him. The incongruity of Johnny being in two places at once–Heaven and his own bed–did not occur to our parents. They never thought of hiding him from us. In those days death was not a shocking affair that should not be shown to children. You lived, you loved, you gave birth and you died and none of these dynamic functions was separable from the others.

  I remember feeling no fear when I saw him. Death gives a great upsurge of strength and sweetened life to the living. Like a stone at the bottom of a well he lay, with the room swinging round in widening rings away and away to the surface. Only his feet disturbed me. They were not lying flat with the rest of his body, which seemed to be flush with the bed. They were tipped up sharply, forward marching, as though they had already set out on a walk that led through the ceiling. I looked away from them hurriedly and kept my eyes on his face. My chief thought, as I gazed at him, was that white was somehow wrong for Johnny–he was always so very black. He looked absurdly quiet and silent, except for that sardonic smile that made him seem our familiar friend, even in his shroud. It cheered me–that smile. I thought he had left it behind for us as a sort of legacy. But apart from the smile, it seemed to me, his body hardly mattered at all. I was far more interested, like the rest of the children, in searching Johnny’s room. We stared round eagerly.

  The hut was impersonal and tidy; it smelt of dust and gumleaves. In one corner hung his jockey-cap and the cerise blouse with the blue arm-bands, and the white pants and his whip. Below them on the chest of drawers, the emu’s egg shone brightly. On the wall hung a faded newspaper picture of our mother bending her doe-like face over her first baby. But these were not the things we sought. Where was his life’s work, we wanted to know. What had he done with the wood?

  ‘Look!’ said our father quietly, his feet like thunder on the wooden floor as he tiptoed away from the bed.

  Then we turned to the little carpenter’s bench and saw the group of figures. There were carved and painted kings and children kneeling beside a stable. No shepherds with flocks of snowy lambs, no angels with folded wings. Instead there were little native creatures–kangaroos, emus, red flamingos; horses and lizards and goats. The kneeling men were cane cutters, offering green cane boughs; swagmen with blankets rolled on their shoulders; drovers carrying whips in their hands and their steers standing meekly by. The crowned figures were rough likenesses of our father, Ah Wong and Billy Pee-kow. The four children in blue smocks–recognisably ourselves–knelt down at the edge of the stable. And alone–apart from men and beasts–stood a little bowed hump-backed figure, with a jockey-cap in its hand. It seemed to be gazing at the crib, which was padded with yellow strips of straw from the sheath of a champagne bottle. The Child lay in it, rosy and gay, waving His hand at the scene. All that was lacking was His halo, which was clutched in Johnny Delaney’s hand when they found him dead in the morning.

  It was lying now, a golden ring, beside a red flamingo. Our mother leaned across our heads and lifted it from the bench.

  ‘This must go with him,’ she said gently, ‘the last thing he touched.’

  ‘No,’ said the eldest child, with a smile. ‘He doesn’t want it now.’

  She took the little golden ring and, lifting the Child from the rough crib, she set it on His head. It clicked home neatly, firm and sure, and Johnny Delaney’s life work was complete.

  P. L. Travers was born Helen Lyndon Goff in 1899 in Queensland, Australia. She worked as a dancer and an actress, but writing was her real love and she turned to journalism. Travers set sail for England in 1924 and became an essayist, theatre and film critic, and scholar of folklore and myth. While recuperating from a serious illness Travers wrote Mary Poppins–‘to while away the days, but also to put down something that had been in my mind for a long time,’ she said. It was first published in 1934 and was an instant success. Mary Poppins has gone on to become one of the best-loved classics in children’s literature and has enchanted generations. In addition to the Mary Poppins books, Travers wrote novels, poetry and non-fiction. She received an OBE in 1977 and died in 1996.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Foreword by Victoria Coren Mitchell

  Aunt Sass

  Ah Wong

  Johnny Delaney

  About the Author

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © by Trustees of the P. L. Travers Will Trust, 1941, 1943, 1944

  Foreword copyright ©
Victoria Coren Mitchell, 2014

  Illustrations copyright © Gillian Tyler, 2014

  Cover art by Gillian Tyler. Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Each story in this collection was published in a limited edition of five hundred copies, privately printed for the friends of the author as a Christmas Greeting: Aunt Sass, first printed in the United States of America in 1941 by Reynal and Hitchcock, Inc. Ah Wong, first printed in the United States of America in 1943 by The High Grade Press Johnny Delaney, first printed in the United States of America in 1944 by The High Grade Press.

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